And to think Paul Gallen and his rugby league mates felt hard done by. A couple of matches with no lasting stigma. They grabbed the offer from ASADA and ran. A similar offer was knocked back by a smug Essendon club and their players. Essendon have found their hell and it is a long, long way back. A minimum 12 months.
The push within Essendon to remove David Evans from the chairmanship just after the story broke in February, 2013, was the moment the club lost any sense of balance and proportion in its battle with both the AFL and ASADA. And ultimately WADA.
With Evans gone and Paul Little in charge Essendon proclaimed they had done nothing wrong in the types of drugs given to 34 footballers at the club in 2012. Little would thump the desk and say no player had been given a drug banned by Australia’s anti-doping authority.
Yet even today no-one at the Bombers or the AFL can say exactly what drugs were administered to the footballers under the care of then coach James Hird. Nonetheless, the players were encouraged to knock back offers to plead guilty and receive a pin-prick of a penalty in return.
Not even that idiot Stephen Dank, who was employed and empowered to run a mostly unsupervised supplement program in 2012 and part of 2013, appears to know what drugs he gave the players. For starters he said they were never given the illegal thymosin Beta 4. Dank has been banned for life by both the AFL and the NRL. He got off lightly. It is not a matter of degrees of governance. There wasn’t any. A peptide free-for-all.
The blame for today’s crippling decision can be thrown in many directions. Very quickly after Essendon alerted ASADA to its suspicions about Dank’s drug program club chief executive Ian Robson resigned. A clever man. After all it happened on his watch. He is now running the successful A-Leage club Melbourne Victory.
Evans was president of the club, Hird the coach. The club doctor was Bruce Reid. He is still at the club but his position now must be untenable if it hasn’t already been for the past three years. Football department officials, assistants and other personnel have gone. Now 12 players on the Essendon list must step aside for the coming season as must another 22 players who have moved on.
The atmosphere at Essendon in 2012 and 2013 was one of invincibility. Hird, the club’s most admired former player, was coach. Another Essendon favourite and successful premiership coach Mark Thompson had returned to support Hird. Evans, the son of former AFL chairman Ron Evans, was president. The dream team was in place but soon that place would turn into a nightmare.
Evans had been trying to fast track a resolution with ASADA and the AFL. This was resisted by powerful former players as well as Hird and Little. Essendon would fight and not settle. What followed was three years of absurdity — grand standing, court actions, tribunals, sackings. A club unravelled.
Little was well intentioned and gave up much to defend his club. His will and intensity cannot be questioned. But it was a campaign based mostly on wishful thinking, pride and not nearly enough common sense or practicality.
The AFL’s lack of policing of all 18 clubs’ sport science programs was exposed. Then AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou knew he had a problem with the growing intrusion of sport scientists into club protocols but mostly spoke about it and never acted until it was too late.
It ended up a dirty mess as the AFL sought to manage the penalties it would hand Essendon, Hird, Thompson and then football manager Danny Corcoran. The AFL must now find the courage to take off Essendon captain Jobe Watson the Brownlow Medal he won in the damned year of 2012. If the competition does not take Watson’s medal than it is nothing more than a small town, insular competition with no regard for Australia’s other sportsmen and women or its responsibility to the rest of world sport.
And the country’s anti-doping authority ASADA was grossly and negligently under resourced for the task of investigating clubs in the AFL and the NRL. This story is a deep scar on the face of Australian sport. Federal Governments have regularly and irresponsibly left ASADA under funded.
The CAS ruling today has strengthened WADA’s role as the world police on performance enhancing drugs. An indigenous game not played out of Australia has been fingered by a body based in Switzerland.
While 34 players have been suspended this is a victory for the athlete. WADA will protect clean sports men and women when and where it must. CAS has ruled the players were responsible for what drugs they took or were administered. It cut them no sympathy for being in a team environment and their belief in assurances given by those in control. The forms provided by Essendon assuring the players the peptide program was clean counted for nothing.
The responsibility is on the player to know what drugs he is being asked to use. No short cut, no get-out clause, no duped and doped parachute. They were all adults, no player under 18.
The AFL has been rocked — the decision described by one administrator as “ugly” — and the rest of Australia’s sporting community from archer to rower comforted. The lack of any substance to the education programs directed at players is stark.
It is an unforgiving decision by the Court of Arbitration for sport. Australia has been warned.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/spo...d/news-story/b1783a2a3ae1fb98329b6ec7692c8f7e
I am f**king shocked Patrick smith wrote this article
